25 Centimes - Union Commerciale et Industrielle - Charlieu [42] Brass

Charlieu, a small textile town in the Loire, saw its local commerce association issue emergency brass tokens in 1920 during the acute small-change shortage that gripped provincial France in the years immediately following the First World War. The French state's inability to keep fractional coinage in circulation — partly due to metal hoarding, partly chronic underminting — forced hundreds of chambers of commerce and local trade associations to fill the gap with their own fiduciary issues, legal under a series of wartime and postwar emergency decrees.

The El Mon reference places this firmly within the broader corpus of French nécessité coinage, a category that effectively ended once the Banque de France restabilized small denomination supply in the mid-1920s.